Events, dear boy, events.

Tag Archives: Islam

The slaughter on the Danforth was awful. It needs to be investigated and we need to know as much as we can about the puke who killed two women and injured another dozen people.

When his name was released – 24 hours after the shooting – a message, purportedly from his family, was also issued. In this statement, the claim was made that Hussain suffered from what was apparently an untreatable mental illness. It was a beautifully written statement which you can read here. It is possible Hussain’s parents actually wrote it. But as immigrants from Pakistan, in a moment of incredible stress, the language was a bit too professional to pass the smell test. But that might be wrong. (I note that we have not actually seen either his father (who is apparently in hospital) or his mother, whereabouts unknown.)

It is not unreasonable, even in light of the claim of mental illness, to ask a few questions:

where was he treated for this mental illness?

by whom and with what result?

where did the handgun come from?

has he travelled since he was an adult?

if so, where?

was he on any police or RCMP watchlists?

what happened to his social media (if any)?

if his social media was deleted, who gave the order to do that?

What evidence, if any, does the RCMP or CSIS have as to his online or RL contacts?

Here is the problem: at this point, we have his parents’ “statement” as to his mental illness and not much else.

You don’t have to be an Islamophobe to wonder if this man had motives other than being plain nuts for shooting up the Danforth. And, if it turns out that he did have other motives, what were they and did they connect to Islamic terror? These are reasonable questions and they need to be answered, publically.

We also need to know what efforts have been made to shape the narrative. My own sense is that the “statement” was not written by a family of Pakistani immigrants or a grieving father from his hospital bed.

The great and the good in Canada, like their peers in Europe, go to great lengths to minimize the Islamic aspects of these acts of terror. “Mentally ill” is a fairly common and difficult to refute explanation. And it might well be true – in which case the psychiatric paper trail should be released.

Hussain may very well have been known to the authorities. But was it as a nutter or as a potential terrorist?

Pulling a veil over the entire, horrible, episode and waving away public concern with a parental claim of “mental illness” is simply not going to cut it. We have all heard it too often. The shooter is dead. He no longer has privacy rights. Let’s find out how he came to be in possession of a handgun and why he chose to use it – and let’s make sure that the public knows exactly what happened.

A Second Thought Where Hussain got his gun is an obvious question for police. As various people have pointed out, unless you have a licence you need a very good connection to get a pistol in Canada. Who has those connections? Well, gangsters and terrorists (usually through gangsters). Was Hussain gangster connected? It is quite possible. And if he was it is very likely that he’ll be in a police database. While it may not look like it, the Canadian police and the RCMP are actually pretty good at tracking the members of the various gangs who operate in Canada. So was Hussain in such a database? Oddly enough, I would be relieved to know he was. Because that would go some distance to ruling out a terrorist angle.

But here is the thing, the police need to let the public in on what they have. We have a right to know if this crime was committed by a crazy person, a gang banger or a terrorist.

Like this:

Ah, but these were the wrong kind of working-class people. They were the Football Lads Alliance (FLA), a fascinating grassroots movement founded earlier this year to protest against terrorism and the ideologies that fuel it. These Football Lads had their first demo on 24 June. Thousands descended on London Bridge, site of an Islamist massacre just three weeks earlier, and held a traffic-stopping demo against extremism. On Saturday they had their second gathering. An estimated 10,000 fans brought Park Lane to a standstill. Rival fans, from Spurs, West Ham, Leeds and other teams, rubbed shoulders, held wreaths in the colours of their clubs, and listened peacefully as speakers railed against hateful extremism and slammed the branding of people who criticise Islamism as ‘Islamophobic’.

It was a very rare thing in the 21st century: a march organised by working-class people and attended by working-class people. Thousands of them. Most marches these days are packed with public-sector types, plummy anti-fascists, and Guardian columnists who must maintain their rad cred by occasionally traipsing through the streets with people holding dusty trade-union banners. But the two FLA marches have been different. They have been cries from below. And they’ve been all but ignored. Sure, there has been media coverage, but it has been perfunctory. Despite being big, stirring and novel — people in football shirts gathering in their thousands to confront the ideology of terror! — the demos haven’t trended online or attracted much attention from the ‘voice for the voiceless’ brigade. They don’t want to hear those voices. The Spectator

O’Neill is a bright, youngish, sometimes Marxist who, I am afraid, channels Orwell. He notices things. He notices actual working class activity. A bunch of football fans, aka hooligans, are not a pretty sight to the more enlightened Guardian reading classes. In fact, these are the very people the modern British state is at great pains to exclude from the conversation. They say such rude things. They don’t buy into the denunciation of Islamophobia. In fact, given their head, they would likely pack up benefits queen Islamists and send them back to the shitholes they came from.

Can’t have that.

My righty friends tend to be very pessimistic about the Islamization of Europe. They write the place off as hopelessly mired in political correctness. I am more optimistic. The FLA is a good start, so are the Poles saying the Rosary on the borders.

Europe is far from over. In fact, there is a sense that it has only begun to fight.

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To repeat what I said a few days ago, I’m Islamed out. I’m tired of Islam 24/7, at Colorado colleges, Marseilles synagogues, Sydney coffee shops, day after day after day. The west cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting things and people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually overseas and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless Islamization and self-segregation of large segments of their own countries.

So I say again: What’s the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn’t prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his “pitiless war” isn’t serious. And, if they’re still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel’s mad plan to reverse Germany’s demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren’t serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

I think the events in Paris bring us a bit closer to being serious. A bit closer to the recognition of the fundamental incompatibility of Islam with Western liberal democracy. We’ll see in the morning.

The way we will see is by paying close attention to our leader’s words and their actions. To allow a million Muslims to arrive in Europe in the guise of refugees is an obvious mistake and one which, with political will, can be corrected. (And, in the Canadian case, to invite 25,000 so called refugees in on a timetable which precludes serious vetting is an excellent test of Trudeau’s seriousness as a leader.) But will it be?

Will Hollande’s “pitiless” crusade against terror actually deploy troops to the “no-go zomes” of Paris for the house to house searches to find the weapons, the illegals and the intelligence? Will the rest of Europe cheer the French on or retreat behind the tut, tuts of multikulti delusion?

We are about to find out if this night in Paris has been enough. I would have thought Charlie Hebdo would have been enough. But I was wrong then. Everybody had a nice march and went home.

Will this be enough? I am afraid I doubt it. Mark is right in that the West simply will not confront the reality of political, imperial, Islam. We’re lazy and we’re nice and we simply can’t imagine the sorts of action which might stop the flow of illegal migrants or the terror in the streets of Paris. Because to imagine that is to treat people who are deeply different from us as alien, as “other”. We are too polite to recognize and treat the cancer which is Islam.

This is a war. It is a war which has been going on since the 7th Century. The other side has always, right from the time of the prophet, understood that this is a war. The West, most of the time, pretends it isn’t. Will Paris convince us to take the war seriously? I hope so but I doubt it.

I really think it will take a mass atrocity: biological, chemical or nuclear with 100,000 or a million deaths, to put a bit of fight in us. And, sad to say, when that happens the terrified left and muddled center will probably try to figure out how to negotiate.

No, really.

When asked Thursday by CBC about confronting ISIS, Sajjan said:

“We need to get better as an international coalition … better at looking at the threats early on, to making sure that we identify them early so they don’t balloon into these big threats,”

“They were smaller at one time, we need to get better at identifying the subtle indicators so we might be able to have dealt with it diplomatically.” the rebel

(Sad to see a Sikh warrior say something so craven about the traditional enemy of the Sikhs.)

Like this:

“Islam is a religion. But “Muslim” is a signifier, and the signified is not your reassuringly white neighbour. Let’s dispense with the disingenuous distinctions of Muslim-baiters and see their xenophobia for what it is—racism in another guise.” Dr. Dawg

I commented….

What a silly position.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.”

—–

The Dawg wants xenophobia to be racism (which is, presumptively, just so damned evil). And he deems Islam to be a religion which, amazingly, is the only racialized religion on the planet. (Oh, and by the way, in other contexts, race is simply a social construct which, I suppose, allows it to be applied, like whitewash, to any instance where it might be useful.)

Now a reasonable person might query, “Why does Dawg want Islam to be a race?” What is useful about converting a religion into a race? How does this assist our understanding of that thing? Or, cynically, is racializing Islam designed as a last ditch attempt to prevent us from understanding that thing?

—–

Here is a suggestion. Try running the argument that Islam is only superficially a religion; scratch the surface and you find a political ideology as fully elaborated as conservatism, liberalism, socialism or fascism. Rather than trying to fit up Islam as a race – which either does damage to Islam or to the common sense idea of race – why not pay attention to its distinctly political elements.

Do races have “law”? Islam does. Do races have a singular position on the Jews? Islam does. Do races have specific views of homosexuality? Islam does. Do races have injunctions as to how to treat non-members? Islam does. Do races have strictures as to how to treat women? Islam does. Do races proselytize? Islam does.

—–
One may be xenophobic or racist with respect to an actual race; but rejecting a political ideology is neither. It may be prudent. It may preserve political positions which are the basis of our society and culture; but it cannot be racist.

For the “progressive” left the defence of Islam should be a deep and enduring embarrassment. Every progressive principle, from basic human equality, feminism, anti-discrimination, anti-slavery, anti-imperialism is violated repeatedly and doctrinally by Islam.

Yet you excuse it. You accuse people who want to fight the evil politics of Islam of the very worst of progressive sins: racism. Because, for some reason, you seem convinced that it is somehow your duty to welcome the agents of your own destruction to your own country and culture. You have this weird need to prostrate yourselves before a politics of brutality, conquest, rape and subjugation.

You’ll have to excuse me if I can’t join you in your political and cultural surrender.

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I walked down Dunbar Street in Vancouver which had a clear view of YVR. Planes were lined up on the runway in a way I’d never seen. I had been watching the news and took my then 11 year old son up to the bank to pull some money on the principle that cash was always good in a crisis.

In the fourteen years that have passed I have had one more son. I have watched the evolution of the narrative from the Islam is not responsible to the “let’s not be Islamophobic” to the bizarre spectacle of the left trying to make a migrant wave into a test of compassion. I have watched the ham-fisted attempts of the Americans and their allies to fight sensitive wars against barbarians.I have watched victories in Iraq and Afghanistan turn to dust under the inept leadership of Obama and his coven of soft power ninnies. I have watched the West welcome Muslim immigrants with the barest of security checks. I have watched Islamic terror in France, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, England, the United States and, sadly, in Canada.

Several hundred years ago the black tide of Islam rolled across the Middle East, North Africa and on into Europe. Slaughter, rape and vast population displacements brought Islam to an unsuspecting world. And then, odd assortments of Europeans began to fight back. Crusades were launched to take back the Holy Places of Christianity from the Islamic invaders. The Crusaders were a brutal, bigoted lot, just as happy to kill Jews and Orthodox Christians as Muslims. But they understood the essentials: the invading Muslims posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and they had to be stopped.

We are all a little older and a little hardened to the sheer brutality of the Islamists. Some of us, mainly on the left, would like to believe that the terror of 9-11 and all the rest has nothing to do with Islam. They would like to believe that al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and the Muslim Brotherhood have nothing to do with Islam. They would like to believe that if we just left the Middle East alone to get on with its sectarian struggles and the eradication of Israel all would be well with the religion of Peace. When the alarm rang on 9-11 a large part of the left looked, saw largely brown people, concluded “racism” and went back to sleep.

The right’s reaction was, I’m afraid, conditioned by the left. Who wanted to be called a racist for pointing out that Islam was entirely incompatible with liberal democracy? Why court the harassment which attended to pointing out the female genital mutilation and keeping your women in bags was anti-feminist? Suggesting that Islam, at root, was medieval and, by doctrine, incapable of reform got you called Islamophobic and worse. So, unfortunately, the mainstream conservative parties – Republicans, Conservatives in Canada and the UK – bent over backward to disassociate terror from Islam. Even ISIS, that most fundamentally Islamist of organizations was touted by the right as an aberration, not Islam at all.
In the end we either learn the hard lesson of 9/11 – that Islam is antithetical to Western liberal democracy and the values it requires – or we don’t. So far we haven’t. So far we have pretended that radical political Islam is somehow an aberrant offshoot of a housebroken, enlightened Islam. We have ignored the fact that there is no moderate Islam. We ignore men like Turkey’s Erdogan who said,

Fourteen years ago, walking down Dunbar, I was expecting the other shoe to drop, another target for mass murder to be taken out. That day the Twin Towers fell, the Pentagon was attacked and half a dozen heroes died as the first casualties of the new war on Islam as they took back control of their plane before it could reach its target.

Read a bit of history and you begin to realize that Islam is, was and always will be the religion of the sword. Our leaders, left and right can pretend otherwise but, ultimately, containing and then pushing back the black tide of Islam is the only way the things we hold dear will survive.

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Canada Day is going to be hot and sunny in my part of the world. Living flags, obscure multi-cultural bands and, later fireworks with routine police checks of everyone riding the buses to make sure no one is actually carrying a beer to the festivities.

Sounds like fun and it is. But this year there is just a hint of caution. Do I really want to take my family into a crowded place? Sure, there is tons of security – those cops will take away your kettle bomb as well as your beer. Chatter is being monitored. CSIS and the Horsemen are on the job.

There is an argument that if you hesitate, if you alter your behaviour in any way, the terrorists have won. It is a good argument but unconvincing. Back in the day, a decade ago, rowdy teenagers were the only issue at Canada Day festivities. Hardly a big deal. Now we have the niggling suspicion that even with Canada’s excellent security services, whack job “lone wolves” are a live possibility.

Looking at the pictures and video from Tunisia, the carnage inflicted by one (or perhaps two) gunmen armed with automatic weapons is dreadful. But one evil Islamist in a F-150 pick-up could do equal damage in a crowd.

Security is always a balance between resources and threat. In Canada, for the moment, the threat seems to be relatively minimal and somewhat contained. Yet I would have said the same thing before the Islamic terrorist shot up the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.

Canada Day celebrations across the country are now targets and the security services wisely treat them as such. Which, I think, tells you how far our situation has deteriorated.

For a variety of reasons I do not like Bill C-51. It is too broad, it lacks essential oversight, it invites abuse. But I agree with the impetus behind the Bill. There are terrorists abroad in the Dominion. They are motivated by support for Islam. They need to be found, stopped, and their networks rolled up. The Tunisians knew where to look – they closed 80 mosques.

If we are going to have our security services deal with terror they need the tools to do it and they need strict oversight and real consequences if they abuse those tools. I wrote about that here. We also need to stop adding fuel to what, in Canada, is still a very small fire. As we lack the resources to positively vet immigrants from majority Muslim nations, we need to have a moratorium on immigration from those nations save for the minorities in those nations who are being slaughtered by ISIS and its ideological allies. And we have to stop pretending that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorists who commit their crimes in the name of Allah.

Canada Day celebrates the birthday of an extraordinary nation. A nation which has welcomed newcomers for its entire life. To keep that nation strong and free, we have to have the gumption to prevent its invasion by people who do not share our broadly held values and whose ideology (masked as a religion) means that they never will. Our security services can, I hope, deal with the potential terrorists who are already here; but asking them to deal with wave after wave of people who will not accept, much less share, our democratic commitments is too much. Sooner rather than later we need to understand and confront the Islamic threat to Canada and the West.

Like this:

“Canada’s diversity is our great and unique strength,” Trudeau said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We are the one country in the world that has figured out how to be strong, not in spite of our differences but because of them. So, the prime minister of this country has a responsibility to bring people together in this country, not to divide us by pandering to some people’s fears.”

Harper’s approach “frays away the edges of our multicultural fabric … (by) stoking and pandering to fears rather than allaying them,” he added.
What’s more, “it’s unworthy of someone who is prime minister for all Canadians.” justin trudeau

Trudeau is reflecting a view that somehow Canadians who oppose special treatment for Muslims are afraid of Muslims.

The alternative view is that Canada should treat all of its citizens equally and pander to none.

By making unnecessary – the veil is not a religious requirement of Islam – accommodation for particular classes of citizens and potential citizens we are creating the conditions in which there may well, in time, be something to fear as there is in France, England, Denmark, Holland, Germany and many other European nations.

Refusing to allow a Muslim woman to take her citizenship oath wearing a political statement is making it easy for a political cult to infest Canada. There are many Canadians who are uneasy with the demands political Islam makes. Excluding a woman who refuses to unveil will make Canada seem a bit hostile to political and cultural Islam. Good. Let people who want veiled women and sharia law go somewhere else. Canada neither needs nor wants them.

Trudeau thinks we have figured out how to be strong in spite of differences. We have; but none of the differences which prior groups of immigrants have brought to Canada include explicit political loyalty to a supremacist cult. The veil is an explicitly political act and, frankly, a direct insult to the nation the veiled woman and her family wish to emigrate to.

The divide in Canada is between those of us who see Islam as an overtly expansionist political organization with a thin veneer of religion and those, like Trudeau, who deny the express teachings of the Koran, the Wahabbi supremacy and the anti-asimilationist rhetoric that is modern Islam. Trudeau seems to be under the impression that there is nothing to fear, nothing to reject in Islam. He is wrong and by attacking Harper for recognizing the profound political importance of the veil, he is demonstrating just how unfit he is for office.

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Bill C 51 seems to be a relatively well thought through approach to the problem of combating terrorism in a free and democratic society. It will, likely, pass muster at the SCC and will allow CSIS to get up the noses of people who support terror. All good things.

But, and it is always a concern, government has a nasty tendency to take the powers it’s given and apply them in ways never within the contemplation of the legislation.

For example, the intention to disrupt a meeting of the G-20 whether in Canada or abroad, if there is even a hint of the physical could trigger the provisions of the bill. I might think G-20 protestors are dweebs but I think there is room for robust protest in the political sphere.

What happens if the Jewish Defense League decides to protest a speaker at Palestine House in Toronto. Or to counter march against the Musoloons the next time Hamas or Hezbollah attacks Israel? And what happens if I or BlazingCatFur put up a link to the protest or counter march?

And so he should be. At this point we are dealing with a Conservative government which has been pretty clear eyed about where the terrorist trouble is coming from.

“It doesn’t matter what the age of the person is, or whether they’re in a basement, or whether they’re in a mosque or somewhere else,” Harper said Friday in Richmond Hill, Ont. cbc

But what if the very dim Liberals are elected and have access to this same set of tools. It is not difficult to imagine that they would loose the dogs of CSIS on people engaged in Islamophobia (or what we call around here, clear thinking) or any other activity which does not contribute to Kumbaya Nation.

So C 51 needs one, large, effective block to its misuse: but what should that block be? The problem with security courts and the like is that they operate, of necessity, in secret. Is there a better way?

There might be. It seems to me that what we are really looking for is accountability and that can be created by using a degree of required, public, disclosure albeit after the fact. Basically, the security services could be required, in order to use the provisions of the new legislation, to file operational plans, including budgets, with specified goals and named targets. These plans would be filed by named agents and managers. (Names could be withheld from the public but would be available to Parliament in the second phase of the oversight.)

At the conclusion of the operation or at the expiration of three years, (extensions available if the government of the day applies to the Chief Justice), these operational plans (with redactions only to conceal the names of active agents), would be made publicly available and subject to a hearing of an all party Commons Committee for a value of service/common sense audit. The outcome of the operation would be disclosed as well. The committee would be charged with grading the operation and would have three grades available to it: commendation, pass, and fail. A finding of fail would mean that every agent and manager associated with the plan would summarily be fired and would not be eligible for further government service for their lifetimes.

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One of the more basic arguments about the Middle East turns on the question of whether Islamic cultures are inherently pre-modern. One side will cite the glories of Islamic scholarship which preserved a good deal of the Western world’s knowledge (a claim which is contested). The other side will say that the real Islam of the Wahabbis is dedicated to the destruction of all that is not “Islamic”.